“Designers can’t help but be inspired by the things that surround them,” says Massif’s designer Steve Matteson. An avid mountain climber, Matteson found his inspiration for his text face family in the dramatic granite formations of North America’s Sierra Nevada Mountains.

Most of Matteson’s type designs are custom projects designed with an end use or customer in mind. Massif, which had no customer or specific purpose, was probably his most personal typeface to date. “My goal was to embody, in Massif’s two-dimensional letterforms, the angular tension and smooth curvature characteristic of the rugged terrain of Yosemite National Park’s Half Dome, which was formed by eons of glacial and tectonic activity,” Matteson explains. The typeface’s striking design echoes the faults and fissures that define a massif formation, resulting in a rich texture when used for body text and revealing distinctive shapes and proportions at display sizes.

The Massif family comes in six weights, from Light to ExtraBold, each with an italic companion. The OpenType Pro suite contains small caps, ligatures and old style figures, and offers a small set of decorative ornaments. Pro fonts also include an extended character set supporting most Central European and many Eastern European languages.